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Sunday, January 19, 2014

Good Bye Winter!....Welcome Summer!.....in January....and a Galette de Rois...

First....Happy New Year to all the blogs that I have not been able to visit!This season has been the most incredible we have seen in Canada in these twelve years. We had the worst snow storms, blizzards, and freezing rain between November and the first days of January. It was that much that we broke many records. We had more than double the snow for each month November and December, the temperatures were the lowest for the season (-35C in November when we should have -20C), we had strong winds (120 km/hour) last week, on Dec 7th, 2013 this Province (Alberta) had few cities with the lowest temperatures on planet earth.....yoopi!!....we won to Siberia and the High Artic Islands!......It was a very tiring period because to have daily activities with that type of weather is exhausting....I have to admit that I love winter, and I love the snow. However, this time was too much. Usually, we have two days of heavy snows, then you clean both your driveway and sidewalk, and after you have a week with blue skies, cold days and no snow.....and then the same pattern again. Now, we had snow each day, we have to clean both the driveway and sidewalk twice a day with the consequences for your back. Just to clean the snow (sometimes 15 cm of height daily), it took me more than one hour!. In addition, we had only gray days that were very depressing, and I had no time to post or visit any blog.....my apologies for that!Now, after record high winds last week that caused not only property damage, and power outages, but also disruptions to the public transit we are having temperatures between +5 and +12C at a time when we should have between -10C and -22C, not considering that February is usually the coldest month with -40C!What is going on in the world??What happens now? Snow is melting rapidly that is very bad for both the soil and for flooding to the houses. Also, I have seen birds that usually comes in April (a sign for a very-early-Spring?). Nobody knows what to do.....Should we start planting tomatoes now? or wait until April?....Are we going to have more snow? or the winter is gone and now we will have a very dry summer with a lot of forest fires?......Apologies for this long story, but many people has wrote me emails asking me what is happening here....One thing for sure is that without cleaning for the snow, I will have more time for posting and visiting your blogs!And of course, our last Christmas Tradition was to have a breakfast with a Gallete de Rois. This time, I made one very big (double size) to have more food and less time cooking (I needed the time for cleaning the snow). It wasn't a good idea. It cooked differently, but we enjoyed it anyway!Galette des RoisThe recipe for the marzipan is here because is the marzipan I make every year.The recipe for the dough is here. I used Feuilletage Inverse